Mary Morris

The author chronicles her travels throughout Central America and shares her observations on the hardship of the region

Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone

Nothing to Declare

One of NPR's Best Books of 2020 From the author of Nothing to Declare, a new travel narrative examining healing, redemption, and what it means to be a solo woman on the road. "Mary Morris has long been a master memoirist...and has even more to teach us about the lengths to which we must go to reach our deepest selves. I loved this book." -Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance In the tradition of Wild by Cheryl Strayed and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, Mary Morris turns a personal catastrophe into a rich, multilayered memoir full of personal growth, family history, and thrilling travel. In February 2008 a casual afternoon of ice skating derailed the trip of a lifetime. Mary Morris was on the verge of a well-earned sabbatical, but instead she endured three months in a wheelchair, two surgeries, and extensive rehabilitation. On Easter Sunday, when she was supposed to be in Morocco, Morris was instead lying on the sofa reading Death in Venice, casting her eyes over these words again and again: "He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers." Disaster shifted to possibility and Morris made a decision. When she was well enough to walk again (and her doctor wasn't sure she ever would), she would go "all the way to the tigers." So begins a three-year odyssey that takes Morris to India in search of the world's most elusive apex predator. Her first lesson: don't look for a tiger because you won't find it--you look for signs of a tiger. And all unseen tigers, hiding in the bush, are referred to as "she." Morris connects deeply with these magnificent and highly endangered animals, and her weeks on tiger safari also afford a new understanding of herself. Written in over a hundred short chapters, All the Way to the Tigers offers an elegiac, wry, and wise look at a woman on the road and the glorious, elusive creature she seeks.

A Memoir

All the Way to the Tigers

'A volume in which rich and unexpected seams of precious materials await discovery' Guardian Three hundred years of wanderlust are captured in this collection as women travel for peril or pleasure, whether to gaze into Persian gardens or imbibe the French countryside, to challenge the fierce Sahara or climb an impossible mountain. The extraordinary women in this collection are observers of the world in which they wander; their prose rich in description, remarkable in detail. Mary McCarthy conveys the vitality of Florence while Willa Cather's essay on Lavandou foreshadows her descriptions of the French countryside in later novels. Others are more active participants in the culture they are visiting, such as Leila Philip, as she harvests rice with Japanese women. Whether it is curiosity about the world, a thirst for adventure or escape from personal tragedy, all of these women are united in that they approached their journeys with wit, intelligence, compassion and empathy for the lives of those they encountered along the way. Also includes writing by Willa Cather, Joan Didion, Vita Sackville-West, M. F. K Fisher, Christina Dodwell and more.

The Virago Book of Women Travellers

In 1492, Luis de Torres, a Spanish Jew, accompanies Columbus as his interpreter. Over the centuries, de Torres' descendants travel from Spain and Portugal to Mexico, finally settling in the hills of New Mexico. Five hundred years later, it is in these same hills that Miguel Torres finds himself trying to understand the mystery that surrounds him and the town he grew up in. Print run 20,000.

A Novel

Gateway to the Moon

The son of a grieving Jewish family in Jazz Age Chicago impresses patrons of a mob-controlled saloon with his piano talents, which become subject to a changing music era, his need to survive and exacting mob demands. By the author of House Arrest.

The Jazz Palace

"If you haven’t read Mary Morris yet, start here. Now. Immediately." —Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things From award-winning novelist Mary Morris comes the remarkable story of a remote New Mexican town coming to grips with a dark history it never imagined. In 1492, the Jewish and Muslim populations of Spain were expelled, and Columbus set sail for America. Luis de Torres, a Spanish Jew, accompanies Columbus as his interpreter. His journey is only the beginning of a long migration, across many generations. Over the centuries, de Torres’ descendants travel from Spain and Portugal to Mexico, finally settling in the hills of New Mexico. Five hundred years later, it is in these same hills that Miguel Torres, a young amateur astronomer, finds himself trying to understand the mystery that surrounds him and the town he grew up in. Entrada de la Luna is a place that holds a profound secret--one that its residents cannot even imagine. It is also a place that ambitious children, such as Miguel, try to leave. Poor health, broken marriages, and poverty are the norm. Luck is unusual. When Miguel sees a flyer for a babysitting job, he jumps at the opportunity, and begins work for a Jewish family new to the area. Rachel Rothstein is not the sort of parent Miguel expected. A frustrated artist, Rachel moved her family from New York in search of a fresh start, but so far New Mexico has not solved any of the problems she brought with her. Miguel loves the work, yet he is surprised to find many of the Rothstein family's customs similar to ones he’s grown up with and never understood. Interwoven throughout the present-day narrative are the powerful stories of the ancestors of Entrada's residents, highlighting the torture, pursuit, and resistance of the Jewish people. A beautiful novel of shared history, Gateway to the Moon is a moving and memorable portrait of a family and its journey through the centuries.

A mother's love

Jacqueline Wilson

Grant Olding

The most popular teenager in Britain comes to the stage! Tracy Beaker Gets Real has been adapted by Mary Morris with music by Grant Olding from one of the most successful children's books ever, Jacqueline Wilson's The Story of Tracy Beaker. We join Tracy, aged 15, as she returns to the "Dumping Ground" and looks back on the last four years of her life, from being fostered - and dumped - and fostered again, to finding a happy, if not altogether harmonious home with writer Cam. When Tracy's mum unexpectedly reappears in her life, Tracy hopes that her days of being passed around like a parcel are over, but she soon comes to realise that the people she has always tried to push away are the ones she really needs the most. Touching and very funny, this play brings Tracy Beaker's trademark talent for troublemaking, fun and friendship to any production.

Tracy Beaker Gets Real!

Adapted from the best-selling novel by Morris Gleitzman. Colin has a mission. He wants to speak to the Queen about his brother Luke who has cancer. Cousin Alistair would like to help but stress brings on his dandruff. Colin takes the lock off the back door and goes out alone.

The Play

Two Weeks with the Queen

Various

Supporting book for the Exhibition Road Show Festival - London 28th July to 5th August 2012.

New Writing Inspired by Exhibition Road

Road Stories

Sent to live with relatives in England when his younger brother develops a rare form of cancer, Colin tries to see the Queen to help find a cure for his brother. Suggested level: intermediate, junior secondary.

Award-winning novelist Mary Morris weaves together an unsolved family mystery, a poignant coming-of-age story, and a little-known corner of World War II history in this lyrical novel of family, loss and, ultimately, love. Thirty years ago, Laura’s mother, Viola, went missing. She left behind her purse, her keys and her mysterious paintings of a red house. Viola was never found, and her family never recovered. Laura, an artist herself, held on to the paintings. On the back of each work, her mother scrawled in Italian, “I will not be here forever.” The family never understood what Viola meant. Decades later, at a crossroads in her marriage and her life, Laura returns to Italy, where her parents met after World War II. Laura spent the earliest years of her childhood there before the family moved to New Jersey and settled into an American dream that eventually became a nightmare. Viola, who claimed to be an orphan, staunchly refused to speak of her life before marriage. In Italy, Laura finds herself on a strange scavenger hunt to solve the puzzle of her mother’s lost years. She is certain that the paintings of the red house hold the answer to her mother’s past and her search takes her from her hometown of Brindisi, deep into Puglia where she encounters a man who knew her mother and who illuminates little-known secrets of Italy’s Second World War. Blending elements of true crime with settings that evoke Elena Ferrante, Laura follows her mother’s trajectory as she ventures north to Naples, Turin and finally home. Along the way, she confronts the dark truth of her mother's story and at last makes sense of her own.

The Red House

Maja Ardal

Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People Theatre Archives (University of Guelph)

Young People's Theatre Archives

Julia Tribe

Two Weeks With The Queen

Mary Morris's first book, the short story collection Vanishing Animals, was widely nailed by critics as one of the most distinguished recent debuts by a fiction writer. The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters recognized her achievement with a citation and the coveted Rome Prize in Literature. Here, in her first novel, Mary Morris continues to fulfill her great promise, giving to her readers a compassionate story of good romance and bad timing, a novel of ordinary circumstance gone awry told with an extraordinary talent that is right on target. Deborah Mills is an urban planner: an expert in traffic, a specialist in roads. At work she can plan for millions of people, but her own life seems to be a muddle. Her seven-year marriage falls apart when her husband tells her he is having an affair with one of her oldest friends. Stunned and angry, she haltingly begins her funny, bittersweet attempt to put her wrecked marriage behind her and start life anew. When her brother Zap, the family renegade, motorcycles back into her life, his reappearance causes Deborah to see how the residue of the past leaves its indelible mark on present events. Inevitably, she must set a new course: enter into new involvements and arrive at a new and encompassing autonomy. At a friend's country house she meets Sean, an assistant film director who looks strikingly like Robert De Niro. He advances, she retreats, and the questions begin. What direction should her future take? Is it too early or too late to begin all over again? Crossroads is a novel about how one woman goes from being tossed about by fate to taking command of her own life. Joyce Carol Oates has praised Mary Morris's fiction as "beautifully crafted." Rosellen Brown has found her work "full of unexpected invention and sudden, almost offhand plunges toward a mysterious center." With Crossroads, Mary Morris gives her admirers a new chance to celebrate.

Crossroads

A Story of the Activities of Voluntary Societies and Voluntary Workers in an Industrial Town

Social Enterprise

Tells the story of three generations of women whose lives have been shaped through the experiences of waiting for one event or another to take place.

The Waiting Room

A compelling collection of poems, Late Self-Portraits conveys an intimate description of lives through a collage of portraits and affliction. Weaving history and the sacred, both intimate and worldly, one encounters a blind Jorge Luis Borges with his mother, a glass confessional in the of Notre Dame Cathedral, Frida Kahlo in Mexico, ghosts, a neurosurgeon's prognosis, and Marie Laveau in New Orleans. Whether in a field with Joan of Arc, encountering the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, or having dinner with Hades, these are haunting poems of loss and unearthing, equally bold, personal, and tender. From "Dinner with Hades": He shows me a birthday cake, candled. My name is written in pomegranate seeds. It's like vertigo. Just before he seeks to devour, he halts to birdsong--sound of goldfinch, bluebird, hawk, lilting of sparrows. Of whippoorwill and dove. Wings flap, so many wings, a cool breeze as leaves unfurl into a once forgotten green and I am back on earth, held in my mother's arms.

Late Self-Portraits

Revenge

Philip Morris

Uncharted Waters

A compelling collection of poems, Late Self-Portraits conveys an intimate description of lives through a collage of portraits and affliction. Weaving history and the sacred, both intimate and worldly, one encounters a blind Jorge Luis Borges with his mother, a glass confessional in the of Notre Dame Cathedral, Frida Kahlo in Mexico, ghosts, a neurosurgeon’s prognosis, and Marie Laveau in New Orleans. Whether in a field with Joan of Arc, encountering the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, or having dinner with Hades, these are haunting poems of loss and unearthing, equally bold, personal, and tender. From “Dinner with Hades”: He shows me a birthday cake, candled. My name is written in pomegranate seeds. It’s like vertigo. Just before he seeks to devour, he halts to birdsong— sound of goldfinch, bluebird, hawk, lilting of sparrows. Of whippoorwill and dove. Wings flap, so many wings, a cool breeze as leaves unfurl into a once forgotten green and I am back on earth, held in my mother’s arms.

Mary Morris

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